


Out from Isolation

by bar2d2s



Category: The Flash (Comics), The Flash - All Media Types
Genre: Best Friends Forever, Gen, Immortality, LITERALLY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-03
Updated: 2018-07-03
Packaged: 2019-06-01 18:04:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15148802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bar2d2s/pseuds/bar2d2s
Summary: Axel Walker does not have a past, a backstory, a history. He's made sure of that.He torches his records every 25 years.





	Out from Isolation

**Author's Note:**

> There is a [long-ass post](https://jewishaxelwalker.tumblr.com/post/160641006101/axel-walker-as-a-character-is-a-real-mess-as-he) I wrote about Axel Walker's distinct lack of an actual canon age, backstory, and personality pre-2011 (thought the post-New 52 comics didn't exactly give us one either...nor did the Injustice comics for that matter), and since basically all I ever do is give him a backstory and a personality relating to a canon age of 17-19, I figured I'd go off the rails a bit and do something...different.

“Okay so...one more time. Explain it to me one more time. I swear this time, I’ll 100% understand.”

Axel sighed, pulled the spoon out of his mouth and plopped it back into the mostly-empty bowl of frozen yogurt. “Like I said the last three times, I’m immortal. Eternal, to be more specific because like, I can  _totally_  die, but it takes some decent effort.” Joey nodded, seemingly to himself, mouthing the words ‘immortal’ and ‘eternal’ a few times, followed closely by the phrase ‘what the fuck’. “You don’t believe me.”

“I’m trying to wrap my head around the idea!” In the dozens of lives he’d lived over the last few centuries, Joey was easily the best friend he’d ever had. And the first person he’d tried to explain the whole ‘I’ve been alive longer than you’d think’ thing to in...a good hundred years. “And some witch just cursed you with immortality?”

“Dolya Nedolya is  _not_  a witch.” Axel snapped, testy. Insulting her was a good way to flip his fortunes for the worse. “She’s the goddess of personal fate. Apparently, I was supposed to have this totally kick-ass life, but I was born poor around one of the major plague years, so that wasn’t going to happen.”

He could practically see Joey’s brain desperately trying to dig up remnants of his 9th grade world history class. “So how’d it happen? This Dolya just bopped you on the head and was like bam, immortal?” Axel sighed again, swirling his spoon around in the melted mess that his froyo had become. Should have picked a heartier food to have this conversation over, like pizza.

“Well, I’d just buried my mother. Literally, I was in the cemetery and everything. So this old woman comes up to me and puts her hand on my shoulder, which wasn’t uncommon, people had been doing that all day.” He took a moment to recall his mother, with her dark hair and blue eyes. They’d looked so much alike when he was a young child, same facial shape, same mouth, same eyes. His father had died shortly after he’d been born and he had no siblings, so the pair of them had been thick as thieves until the day his mother died. She had been a weaver, and he’d learned to make simple clothes at her knee, a skill he’d continued to hone over time. No matter the era or place, people always needed clothes.

“Ax?” Joey waved his hand in front of Axel’s face and he startled, not realizing just how long the pause he’d taken had lasted.

“Right, yeah. The old woman. She said she’d come as soon as she’d heard I was on my own, asked what I’d do now. The town I’d grown up in was small, and didn’t really have anything for me now that my mother was gone.” He’d looked for it, the last time he’d been in Europe, but the land had long since swallowed the place where he was born. “She suggested I try Kiev, as a young man with skill could make his mark easily there. I told her that I didn’t want to make a mark, that I wanted to die.”

He’d been in a bad place that day, which was understandable. He was completely alone for the first time in his life, and this nosy old broad wasn’t exactly making his mood any lighter.

“That was about the time she smacked me upside the head and called me ungrateful which, rude. And that’s when I actually went and  _looked_  at her.” Dolya hadn’t really been old, more around his mother’s age. Axel had heard stories about fate visiting people, he’d just never thought she’d come for  _him_. He wasn’t that special. “Dolya told me that I’d been destined to achieve greatness, but I’d never do it there or, frankly, then. I’ve always looked young, and I guess Dolya was feeling whimsical that day, because she told me that I'd be 17 forever.” He paused his story there, taking the time to scrape up the last of his pistachio yogurt soup. His mouth was dry. “Well actually she said I'd be 'forever on the precipice of manhood, destined never to topple', which to me was basically the fanciest set of words ever strung together, back when I heard them."

"Which was..?" Axel hoped that Joey didn’t notice his little wince. This was always the hard part.

"I wanna say early 1400s? It's been a long time, and I didn't actually notice that I'd stopped aging until I was 50." 

There was a long stretch of quiet, then. Axel could hear kids playing basketball on the court across the street from their apartment. His bowl was empty, the bright yellow spoon from the froyo place seeming to mock him where it sat.

“So you’ve been 17 for like 600 years? Shit, you’ve got that vampire kid beat by miles.” Axel choked on the breath he’d been holding, too relieved to care that his laughter had spiraled into a coughing fit.

“Did you just compare me to the guy from Twilight?! We’re not friends anymore.”

But they were friends, best friends. Friends that shared the deepest of secrets. They talked all through the afternoon, until the day’s shadows lengthened and vanished. Joey asked him about his earliest years (”Isn’t Kiev in Poland?” “Close, Ukraine. I’m not from Kiev, though. The town I was born in was several hundred miles away, and was part of Russia. It might be part of the Ukraine now, I don’t know. I haven’t really kept up with border lines since I came to America.”), and how he’d managed to keep himself alive for so long (”Stayed away from big cities when people started dying like crazy, avoided getting caught up in any big revolutions, stole and hid  _a lot_  of gold over the years, and changed identities every 25 years or so.”).

“So wait, is Axel Walker even your real name?” Axel shrugged.

“Legally? Yeah. I’ve got a guy who draws up new identities for me. His great-grandfather and I served in the war together. I just tell him what I want my new name to be, he does the rest.”

Originally, his name had been Absalom. He’d kept that name for a long time, traveling from place to place whenever people began to act like they knew him too well. It worked for decades, too; no one questioned the legitimacy of Absalom the walker, who traveled here and there with his cart and sold the clothes made in his mother’s shop back home. He simply was, and simply did. 

And then some asshole came up with  _surnames_  and  _record-keeping_ , and his entire way of life went out the window. 

Absalom became Abraham, became Alexander, became Arthur. Then back to Absalom for a brief period in the early 1900s, when he enlisted and was sent back to Europe. From around 1930 through 1965, he was Adam. Safer that way. He might go back to Absalom again some day, if the old-fashioned biblical names ever come back into style.

Joey raised a brow.

“It’s a version of my real name.” Axel relented. Absalom Walker had a paper trail, one he’d tried damned hard to erase effectively but...bits and pieces were still there. And that part of his life, he wasn’t ready to share just yet.

His larger friend shrugged, then stretched his arms above his head, went to stand. “Okay, fine. So now that I know you’re legal to have a beer, want one?” Axel wrinkled his nose, and Joey laughed. “You’re older than dirt and you just... _never_  learned to like beer, huh?”

“You shouldn’t have to learn to like a drink.” Axel grumbled, following Joey to the kitchen. “Beer is just Stockholm Syndrome: the beverage.”

Joey laughed so loud and so long at that, their downstairs neighbor began to bang on her ceiling with a broom. Axel would apologize later, probably. Mrs. Bergman was in her 80s and crotchety as hell, but she also liked to shove fresh batches of aebleskivers at him whenever he went home via the fire escape and passed her window.

“You realize that every time you say something weird now, you won’t be quirky, right? You’re just a confused old man, who can’t understand the youth of today.” Joey gasped once he’d finished laughing, tossing him a bottle of root beer. 

“Joey, you’re 25. _You’re_ not even a youth of today anymore.”

“Maybe, but I don’t remember where I was when Franz Ferdinand was shot.” Now it’s Axel’s turn to laugh and he does, throwing his twist-off cap at his roommate.

He’d expected this to be weird, for Joey to send him packing. To have to up and leave a city  _yet again_   because of something he literally had no control over.

Instead, they’re drinking root beer and laughing about historical assassinations. As you do.

“You know you’re stuck with me, right? I’m gonna be your grand kids’ babysitter someday.”  _I’ll be a pallbearer at your funeral_ , he doesn’t say, because that reality is just too sad to think about right now.

“I figured as much, when I woke up from a coma and you’d moved into my place. We’re BFF, bro, emphasis on that second F.” Joey held out his fist for bumping, and Axel took the offer.

Eternity lasted a long time, and it could get lonely. But for the first time in quite a while, Axel was content. He’d be set for friendship for the next few decades. 

And who knew, maybe tar could be just as ageless as he was. It couldn’t hurt to try.


End file.
